'Space elevator' man discusses his dream

Bremerton native has had a hard sell

By DAN RICHMAN, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Updated 10:00 pm, Monday, May 2, 2005

Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Michael Laine is chief strategic officer of LiftPort, a Bremerton firm working on developing a device to carry satellites and other loads into space. Here, he displays a model of the device, shown in the foreground. less

Michael Laine is chief strategic officer of LiftPort, a Bremerton firm working on developing a device to carry satellites and other loads into space. Here, he displays a model of the device, shown in the ... more

Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

'Space elevator' man discusses his dream

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Impossible. Silly. A wasted effort.

Those are just some of the slams that Bremerton entrepreneur Michael Laine, 37, had to endure as recently as three years ago.

It happened whenever he discussed his grand scheme: to build a carbon nanotube ribbon 62,000 miles into outer space and send laser-powered robotic climbers up it, cost-effectively carrying up cargo into space.

He believes the "space elevator" could cost-effectively put into orbit an important source of energy: solar-energy satellites.

It could greatly reduce the cost of launching telecommunications satellites, testing pharmaceuticals -- and, eventually, transporting people to the moon, Mars and beyond.

Now, said Laine, the project has enough credibility that students or faculty at 11 major universities are volunteering to address the project's myriad challenges.

"The giggle factor's not so bad now," said the Bremerton native, who founded and leads LiftPort Inc., a five-employee privately held company.

How did you get this idea? It's at least 100 years old. I always read a lot of science fiction.

What's your history? I did three years at Boston University and ran out of money. It hasn't handicapped me.

I lost more than $100,000 of my own money, and $200,000 of other people's money, on a dot-com online grocery business I founded and ran.

Then I took some time off.

I knew what not to do. I started talking to these brilliant guys on message boards, and all of them had really interesting ideas, but when you start asking them about return on investment, they don't even know what those words mean.

The space elevator has a clear ROI. Whether it works or not, the spinoff technologies are valuable.

Are people buying into them? Nobody's signed on the dotted line yet, but we're definitely getting some attention from security companies and the military.

Who's doing what on the project? A Ph.D. candidate at MIT, Blaise Gassend, is studying how to best construct the ribbon. A Georgia Tech undergrad, John Christian, helped coordinate a trial of our latest robotic climber.

Our research director, Tom Nugent in Bellevue, is giving his time right now to coordinate volunteers, and he'll be overseeing applications we'll make for grants to fund more research. This is a team effort.

What's your role? We're the commercial company that's acting as the catalyst for the elevator. We bring the brainpower together and we start assigning tasks.

We're also interested in designing and building the robotic climber, and we're building a factory in New Jersey to create nanotubes as a money-making sideline.

The project will cost $7 billion to $10 billion. We're on target to complete it within 13 years.

How does LiftPort compare with your dot-com days? We believe in what we're doing. But no one has slept on the floor yet here, and I don't want them to. I'm glad those days are done.

You mean the days of low pay and stock options? We are doing that. We don't have a lot of capital, and I'm really tight about how we spend it. Everybody on the project could seriously double their salaries if they went somewhere else.

What's the potential upside for you? I'd like to be wealthy. I really think this is going to make that happen. But the goal is to change something. With this infrastructure, you make possible things I've always dreamed about.

Like what? The technology to beam inexpensive, endlessly renewable solar energy to the earth has been in place for 20 years, but it's too expensive to get those satellites into orbit. Right now it costs $10,000 to $20,000 per pound. We're talking about $400 per pound. That's completely revolutionary.